content delivery networks

Lori MacVittie (F5): “Fast is an incredibly, incredibly stressful thing to try and do.” [PODCAST]

16 Apr 2013

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I am so incredibly tempted to call Lori MacVittie the First Lady of Web Performance, if only because I know how hard it would make her laugh. But seriously, in the intro to my latest podcast, I said that Lori’s forgotten more about the history of our industry than most of us ever knew, and I meant it.

Performance has become a hot topic in the past three or four years, but it’s been around since the inception of the web, and it’s meant different things at different times. Up till six or seven years ago, the focus was on just keeping sites up under load stress, no matter whether or not this meant losing a few seconds. Fast forward to today, and things have done a complete turnabout. As most of us know, optimal performance is not only about supporting millions of users, but also ensuring that each of these users is blazing fast. As Lori points out, “it’s an incredibly, incredibly stressful thing to try and do, because you’ve got even more moving parts now than you did then.”

Lori and I covered a lot of ground in our chat, from the early acceleration pioneers who helped birth modern-day FEO, to ADCs and SDNs and a bunch of other cool acronyms. Lori also made a heroic attempt to convince me that the cloud is interesting. You’ll have to listen to the podcast to see if she succeeded. :)

(Note: I want to apologize in advance for the audio quality in this podcast. We’re working on making it better.)

Listen to the podcast: Lori MacVittie

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New findings: Typical leading European commerce site takes 7.04 seconds to load

19 Mar 2013

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Last fall, at Velocity London, I had a really great talk with Stephen Thair, who is a UK-based web performance consultant, Velocity committee member, WebPerfDays organizer, and all-around knowledgeable guy. Among other things, we talked about how frustrating it can be for performance pros based in Europe to preach outside their community.

As Stephen said:

“I guess it’s a bit frustrating in the UK at the moment. One of the things that I found is that we haven’t yet got that killer web performance case study in one of the big major retailers. So we are still, I think, a bit in the evangelical stage. We are still trying to get the message out there. There are still a lot of websites in the UK that don’t even have gzip turned on.”

So we set out to help fill that gap. In December of 2012, working with Radware (our soon-to-be parent company) in conjunction with our partners at Level 3 in Europe, we studied the page speed and composition of 400 top European retailers, as ranked by Internet Retailer magazine, to see how these sites would load for visitors using Chrome 23 (the most popular browser in the EU at the time of testing) via the test server in Amsterdam. (We chose the Amsterdam location because it allowed us to test across all major browsers.) The report was released today.

While the results may not be shocking if you’ve been paying close attention to this space, they may come as an eye-opener to online retailers in the EU. Our chief finding was this:

The median page took more than 7 seconds to load.

Depending on whom you ask, the average internet user expects web pages to load in less than 3 seconds, 2 seconds, or even 400 milliseconds. The last time the average person reported being cool with 7-second load times was around 2001.

The survey also found that:

  • 1 out of 4 pages took more than 10 seconds to load.
  • 1 out of 3 pages contained more than 100 resources.
  • 79% of sites don’t use a recognized CDN. (A “recognized CDN” refers to any CDN listed in the extensive directory of CDNs maintained by WebPagetest.)
  • Speaking to Stephen’s point about gzip at the top of this post, 1 out of 5 sites failed to implement text compression, a relatively simple technique that delivers easy, significant performance gains.

Why you should care about these findings

I may be pointing out the obvious, but it may need to be pointed out: these expectations are universal. Internet users in the EU do not have lower performance expectations than users in North America. These findings should be a wake-up call for European site owners. (Not that North American site owners should be resting easy. Last fall, we found that the median leading US commerce home page took almost 7 seconds to load.)

Download the report: State of the Union: European Ecommerce Page Speed and Web Performance

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Aaron Peters (Turbobytes): Why all CDNs are not created equal [PODCAST]

22 Feb 2013

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This week’s podcast is, for me, a fascinating convergence of two hot-button topics: content delivery and real user measurement (RUM).

This is a really exciting time in the CDN space. If you haven’t spent a lot of time in the content delivery world, you need to know that it’s an intensely competitive space. In just a few short years, it’s shifted from being a virtual monopoly to a much more competitive landscape, with new contenders arriving almost weekly, it seems. Content delivery can be expensive. It can also be really hard to know which CDN will actually deliver the goods the fastest, since this can fluctuate over time and geographical locations.

Over in its own parallel world, RUM has really evolved over the past few years — from an arcane topic discussed by only the geekiest geeks to a subject that’s on pretty much every site owner’s lips (or at least should be). It’s a no-brainer that any content owner wants to get as much insight as possible into how their content moves out in the real world. The funny thing is that it took so long for our tools to catch up to this need.

It was only a matter of time before someone saw an opportunity to apply RUM to pick the best CDN by region/time. Pioneered by my good friends at Cedexis, this practice has been adapted for the SME market by my guest this week, Aaron Peters, along with his partner Sajal Kayan. Their company, Turbobytes, which launched last spring, monitors the real-world performance of six global CDNs, and then ensures that site owners’ content is always delivered by the fastest one. They buy buckets of CDN capacity and resell it to their customers, thus creating a one-stop shop for CDN measurement, dynamic CDN selection, and small object caching. And as the icing on the cake, Turbobytes wants to monetizes all the RUM data it gathers by selling it back to the CDNs.

Aaron was kind enough to sit down and share with me how he and Sajal came to this business model.

Listen to the podcast: Aaron Peters

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2013 predictions: The average web page will hit 2MB, Android will pull ahead of iOS for good, and your smartphone will get infected with a virus

11 Dec 2012

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It wouldn’t be December without a batch of audacious predictions for the new year. Assuming we all survive past December 21st, here’s what I think 2013 will hold for site owners, mobile users, CIOs/CTOs, RUM vendors, and the browser wars.

1. The average web page is going to hit 2MB.

A year ago, I predicted that the average web page would hit 1MB in 2012, which it did in May. Today, the average page is 1280KB. In a post I wrote last month, I predicted that, at the current rate of growth, typical page size would hit 2MB in early 2014. I’m upgrading that prediction to the end of 2013. Call it a hunch. This has massive implications for site owners in terms of bandwidth, but mobile users will be hardest hit, from both a usability perspective and a throttling/data cap perspective.

2. By the end of 2013, at least half of all North Americans will own a tablet.

Currently, 29% of North Americans own some kind of tablet. With the proliferation of new inexpensive tablets, with the emergence of kids as a mostly untapped tablet market, and with Christmas just around the corner, I’m predicting that more than 50% of North Americans will own a tablet by year end.

3. Global mobile traffic will hit 25% of total internet traffic.

Right now this number is 13%, but numbers are surging in China and India.

4. 25% of online shopping will be via mobile.

With the explosive adoption of tablets, we’re going to see a major jump in mobile shopping. Mobile phones and tablets represented 24% of online shopping on Black Friday, up from 6% just two years ago. We’re going to see that Black Friday stat become the norm.

5. 2013 will be the year your smartphone gets infected with a virus.

You know it’s coming. Cue the dark lords of anti-virus software to the rescue.

6. Android will pull ahead of iOS smartphone adoption. For good.

In five years, we’re all going to look back on 2013 as the year Android pulled ahead for good on smart phones. When it comes to this kind of call, I use the Strangeloop team as the canary in the coal mine. My dev team is moving to Android en masse. I haven’t seen this type of shift since 2009 when the mass exodus from Blackberry began.

7. Mobile performance will continue to be a major problem.

Mobile sites will remain too slow. Too many people still believe that their simplified mobile site is the answer (which it’s not, because it’s often too simple), or that responsive web design is the answer (which it’s not, because RWD pages can actually be even bigger and slower than a typical page). There’s no single magic bullet for mobile performance. Companies are going to have to really apply themselves to finding solutions that work for their unique situations.

8. This will be a great year for Chrome, an okay year for Internet Explorer, and a bad year for Firefox.

Internet Explorer will halt the bleeding and stabilize, but not grow, its market share. Chrome will hit 45% of worldwide browser market share by the end of the year — almost entirely at the expense of Firefox.

9. Two of the four largest CDNs will be acquired and integrated into larger companies.

I’m not naming names, and I have no inside information. This is just my hunch that we’re going to see big changes in this market.

10. Netflix will continue its decline, while Amazon video delivery will ascend.

Amazon’s rise in video delivery to the home will become evident in 2013. Amazon can outspend almost anyone for content — and when it comes to video, content trumps all.

11. DDOS attack mitigation will dominate the enterprise.

There’s nothing CIOs/CTOs hate more than visible failure. Sixty-five percent of the top ecommerce sites will have a mitigation strategy in place by the end of 2013.

12. RUM vendors will finally start to make money.

Real user monitoring will move from the sideshow to the main stage for half of analytics vendors. We’ll even see the first example of actionable RUM, which operations can use to trigger alarms that matter. Operations will start to trust RUM. By year end, RUM will be found on 35% of ecommerce sites.

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We’re teaming up with Amazon Web Services to bring advanced FEO to CloudFront customers

26 Nov 2012

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There’s a great quote from Geoffrey Smalling, CTO at Wine.com, in this Strangeloop case study:

Anyone who tells you there is [a single magic bullet] does not have a deep understanding of the myriad issues that affect performance. Performance tuning requires a multi-tiered approach.

To get the best acceleration results, most of our customers use a combination of front-end optimization (FEO), content delivery network (CDN), application delivery controller (ADC), and in-house engineering. But this many acronyms can come with a steep price tag. While this is a great approach if your company has deep pockets or the in-house know-how to structure these solutions, let me paraphrase an old ad: “For everyone else, there’s Amazon CloudFront and Strangeloop.”

This is my roundabout way of announcing our latest partnership, this time with Amazon Web Services. Effective immediately, we’re teaming up to offer Strangeloop’s Site Optimizer service to CloudFront customers.

CDN + FEO: Two great tastes (etc.)

The benefits of combining content delivery with FEO aren’t news if you’ve been reading my blog for a while. To sum it up, CloudFront addresses the performance middle mile by bringing resources closer to users — shortening server round trips and, as a result, making pages load faster. Strangeloop’s technology tackles performance at the front end, analyzing and optimizing every page of a site, without touching code, so that it renders more efficiently in the browser.

As the table below (which uses data from this case study) shows, this combined solution has a huge impact on page metrics, from number of requests to payload to start render and load times. The bottom line: a combined CDN/FEO solution can make pages up to four times faster.

Q: Who wins? A: Small- to mid-sized companies

As a pay-as-you-go service, CloudFront brings an affordable content delivery service to smaller companies. In the same way, we can now bring advanced FEO — which has formerly only been available to companies with those aforementioned deep pockets — to smaller companies, as well as to companies for whom FEO is murky new territory.

Amazon Web Services senior manager Alex Dunlap has written a really great post on the AWS blog that talks about our partnership and explains how to configure Amazon CloudFront to work with Site Optimizer. I urge you to check it out if you want more insight into how our services complement each other.

If you have any questions about how these two solutions work together or their net benefit, let me know. In the meantime, expect an Amazon sales rep and a Strangeloop rep to show up at your door and make a compelling case for why you can get better performance for a fraction of the cost you are currently paying your existing provider. Let the games begin. :)

MORE: Find out how to get started with CloudFront and Strangeloop.

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